Marc André Bodet

Does Proportional Representation Foster Closer Congruence Between Citizens and Policy Makers

This article assesses the claim that proportional representation (PR) fosters a closer correspondence between the views of citizens and the positions of the government. The study uses the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data set and compares respondents’ self-placements on a Left-Right scale with placements of cabinet parties’ locations in 31 election studies. The authors argue that PR has two contradictory consequences. On one hand, PR leads to more parties and more choice for voters; but these parties are less centrist, and this increases the overall distance between voters and parties. On the other hand, PR increases the likelihood of coalition governments; this pulls the government toward the center of the policy spectrum and reduces the distance between the government and voters. These two contradictory effects of PR wash out, and the net overall impact of PR on congruence is nil. The data support the authors’ interpretation.

Campaign News and Vote Intentions

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between campaign news and vote intentions, drawing on manual content analyses from the 2004 and 2006 Canadian federal elections. The content analysis is designed to capture, among other items, the ‘tone’ of coverage for parties and leaders. Combining time series of ‘tone’ and commercial polling results, econometric methods are then used to build a model of vote intentions. Media content appears to explain a good deal of the over‐time variance in vote intentions. Results are discussed as they pertain to two versions of the media‐opinion relationship: (1) media content captures and arranges in a readily quantifiable form the evolving mood of the campaign, or (2) media do not simply reflect, but affect vote intentions.

Voting Strategically in Canada and Britain

The objective of this paper is to ascertain the level of strategic voting in Canada and Britain through a simple “direct” approach. We wish to show that the level of strategic voting is remarkably constant over time and across space; it varies little from one election to the next in Canada and the level of strategic voting is about the same in Britain and Canada. We show that though the overall degree of strategic voting is low in each of the elections examined, it represents a substantial fraction of those for whom strategic voting is a meaningful option. We define strategic voting as a vote for a party or candidate that is not the preferred one, motivated by the intention to affect the outcome of the election ( Blais et al. 2001 ). This entails that in order to determine whether a vote is strategic or not, we need to know the person’s vote choice, her preferences, and her perceptions of the likely outcome of the election ( Blais and Bodet 2007 ). There are two basic approaches to the measurement of strategic voting: direct and indirect ( Blais et al. 2005 ). The direct method consists in specifying the conditions that need to be satisfied in order for us to conclude that a vote is strategic. The indirect (or parametric) method consists in constructing a model of vote choice and in estimating, on the basis of simulations, how many individuals would have voted differently if perceptions of the likely outcome of the election had had no effect on their decision. In this paper, we make use of the direct approach. We first apply this method to Canadian elections. Since 1988, Canadian Election Studies have included questions about voters’ perceptions of the various parties’ chances of winning in their constituency, questions that are required to ascertain strategic voting in single-member plurality systems. We then turn to the 2005 British Election Study, which incorporated questions about perceived chances of winning.

Representation at the margins The impact of governing parties on spending in Canada

This article tests the role of governing parties in budgetary policy in Canada. Using federal expenditure data in policy domains related to defence, economic and social policies, we estimate party effects on government spending since 1965. Results suggest that, holding other variables constant, a partisan effect exists in most policy domains under study. Furthermore, multipartyism tends to impact the role of parties in public spending.